Book Clubs Bring Human Rights Home
Human rights book clubs are active around the country, and serve as an important site for grassroots education, discussion and organizing. In Boise, Idaho, for example, community members are exploring issues of immigration reform through reading Enrique’s Journey, by Sonia Nazario. Kean University in New Jersey sponsors an active human rights book club, with readings, exhibits and associated speakers throughout the school year. Voice of Witness provides support to nascent book clubs, with the aim to “foster a more nuanced, empathy-based understanding of human rights crises through first person oral narratives.” To learn more about VOW’s book club program, click here.
A new book by Michael Glachinsky, Modes of Human Rights Literature, provides a scholarly grounding for the role that human rights literature plays in shaping a culture of human rights. According to the publisher’s blurb,
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[t]his sophisticated book argues that human rights literature both helps the persecuted to cope with their trauma and serves as the foundation for a cosmopolitan ethos of universal civility—a culture without borders. Michael Galchinsky maintains that, no matter how many treaties there are, a rights-respecting world will not truly exist until people everywhere can imagine it.
In other words, while “small” and “close to home,” human rights book clubs bring human rights home in powerful and transformative ways.